I'm reluctant to question Shotwell's business sense, so it makes me think they have a plan to even do dedicated smallsat launches for cheaper than anyone else. She has to know Rocketlab is pursuing reuse. Or perhaps they aren't dedicated, but they can give the operator the exact orbit they want exactly when they want it, and have enough [Delta V] left over for their own secondary mission.

This has got to be the right answer. Make a universal propulsion module (maybe even using Starlink hardware you're spending money to develop anyway). You could even do power and telecommunications on the same trunk, to simplify satellite development. Provide a universal interface that you can mount any smallsat to, and launch dozens of them at once, cheaply, and fly them to exactly where they want to be using ion thrust.

This also largely solves the junk issue, as you can ensure each smallsat is capable of deorbiting itself and performing avoidance maneuvers by leaving a small amount of fuel in the propulsion unit.

For very small sats, you could even provide the equivalent of a server rack, where one trunk powers and networks dozens of micro-sats sharing space on a panel. So long as all the customers are comfortable sharing an orbit and orientation, the cost for this could be outrageously low.

A few of us talked about creating mounting hardware on the top 4 Starlink sats. The customer's small sats would connect to them, and would serve as their propulsion modules to slightly change the orbits for them.

It just depends. Let's say your sat is 200 kg. To change planes significantly (VERY expensive in LEO), it could easily take 200kg (or more) of fuel/kick state. This more than doubles the price of the F9 launch, and comes with the added cost, complexity, dev time, and risk of getting to orbit. This could come out cheaper or more expensive, but it should be fairly close.

I expect Electron to do well in a time period spanning 5 years. I think they're small enough, and have a niche enough of a market to make it work. Especially with their upper stage being able to stay attached to a sat, and being the permanent brains and propulsion for it. Makes it a LOT easier to develop a sat.

I think Full reusability will change things dramatically though. I can see electron scaling up to something like 2-4x of their size, recovering their first stage, and keeping a small, expendable, cheap second stage. They should be able get the cost's down to under $1million/launch this way. I think that will have a business market for a long time. Especially with being able to go exactly when/where you want.

I just can't see Starship changing orbital planes to drop off a single 150 kg sat in an odd orbit.

I think hes talking about an inclination change and you are talking about the longitude of the ascending node? Both part of the orbital plane according to my wikipedia knwoledge :P
for the former its not possible, for the latter yes.

The USB mentioned in your other post is even more useful for SS than F9. The mass and volume would be trivial as secondary payload. I'm thinking that Starship 'never' delivers smallsat payloads directly. It drops USB's from it's cargo pods as secondary payloads. They merrily carry smallsat payloads on their way to unique planes. As a customer, you know that on every weekly SS flight there's a set number of USB slots available to purchase. The smallsat customer is paying for the USB, in whatever size they need. The primary customer has paid for the launch already.

They might go for ULA's idea of using leftover propellant to refill orbital tugs. Every starship goes up with a full fuel load, and then spends some time meeting up with or releasing one or more tugs before landing.

It'd also allow them to get into the satellite recovery / reboosting business, and make use of their in-orbit refueling and propellant conditioning tech. Depending on how they structure things it might even be optimal for the "tanker" for Mars missions to be just a Starship with a couple of fully-fueled tugs attached (although, I suspect at first it will be just a zero-payload launch without any extra tugs, but if they upgrade the engines to the full 300 bar that may change).

I'm kind of handwaving the economics here; I have no idea how cost-effective it would be. Such a tug does sound like it would have quite a bit of mass overhead; SpaceX would be basically counting on each tug staying up for quite a while and being able to use it productively while it's up there, so they get a lot of benefit out of the effort and expense of building and launching one.

Else it would just be trading lower profit margin for higher launch rate. Hm, actually, SpaceX would still go for that I think. They need to keep quite a lot of Starships around for their Mars mission, and each one needs to be flying commercial missions as much as possible for the whole project to be financially feasible.

If SpaceX is launching every two weeks a time slot wouldn't be an issue. The only thing Rocket Lab can offer is dedicated orbits, which admittedly is a big deal, but you have to really need that orbit.

If you have a 200kg smallsat but require another 200kg tug for a plane change then you're up to $2M in launch costs from SpaceX. Say you have to pay $1M for that tug, now you're up to $3M to get you to the right orbit. That's still half of RocketLap with current F9 pricing, and SpaceX doesn't plan to stick with their current F9 for too much longer.

I'm reluctant to question Shotwell's business sense, so it makes me think they have a plan to even do dedicated smallsat launches for cheaper than anyone else

I can see a case for that. A big launch vehicle carrying nothing but smallsats could throw out a huge number of them. PSLV-C37 set what I believe is the current record of 104 smallsats in one go. That's... a lot, and no reason to think more wouldn't be possible.

I'm not 100% convinced there isn't a place for smaller launch vehicles and dedicated smallsat launchers anyway but, like you said, I think Gwynne Shotwell probably knows the business angle of all of this better than we do!

Wishing Electron and Rocketlab all the best in any case--such a cool launch vehicle and I hope it succeeds!

Yeah, I kind of want to split hairs with that. I don't think that Photon allows them to really compete with the cheaper SpaceX price, but it likely does let them survive in a new adjacent market. I'm betting that's what happens with RocketLab, they do well for a couple of years launching rockets, then get out-paced by the larger bulk rockets that are fully reusable, but they transition into providing services and components.

Yeah, I kind of want to split hairs with that. I don't think that Photon allows them to really compete with the cheaper SpaceX price, but it likely does let them survive in a new adjacent market.

I'm not sure I understand where you're splitting those hairs.

Prior to Photon, if you want to fly your instruament on a rideshare your choice would be to manufacture your own payload, or pay someone else to manufacture, then you'd shop for your launch from the various rideshare launch providers.

A percentage of Photon customers are those that simply not afford to manufacture their own satellite. However, the rest of the Rocketlab Photon customers would have otherwise had their payload manufactured and flown elsewhere, but are now simply flying their instrument on Photon. That would be a net loss of a customer for SpaceX or any other rideshare launch provider.

Is that not the definition of competing for business irrespective of the cost of the launch itself? Your statement leads me to believe you down see Photon subtracting customers from traditional ride share launches. Am I not understanding your position?

I don't think RocketLab will be able to compete in the launch market, but I think they'll be able to provide the hardware which launches on competitors. So the splitting hairs is that they will fail to compete, but survive as a business with other income sources.

They don't. The Starlink launch architecture means that they can swap individual starlinks for paid customers fairly freely. These scheduled launches are going on schedule (full of starlinks) even if there isn't a single paying customer aboard.

Retail smallsat (to distinguish from large constellations like Starlink and others) is a self-limiting business. If you wanted to launch just one 150kg satellite, you could pay Rocket Labs $6M and you're done. If you wanted to launch 10, you could pay SpaceX $60M and get another 16 thrown in for free. So 1500kg total payload is the break point between retail and wholesale where it becomes cost effective (compared to Electron) to buy an entire heavy lift (F9) launch even if you don't fill it. Less than that and perhaps you buy 6 Electrons or whatever. Now let's look at SpaceX's 6 rideshares per year. That's capacity to launch the equivalent of 360 starlinks (volume limited). Since you are targeting retail customers (less than 1500kg total), you need somewhere between 36 and 200 individual customers. I don't know that there are that many projects going on anywhere and, as Spaceflight Industries can surely tell you, coordinating 100 bleeding edge projects to all deliver on the same date is beyond insane. That's where the scheduled run model really shines. Anyone who can deliver their payload and all the paperwork by a certain date, gets on and, if they don't, they can try again in a few weeks. I can easily imagine a family of starlink-compatible dispensers to handle most common form factors including cubesats or any satellite intended for a dedicated smallsat launcher. They could even offer a powered option using a starlink-derived hall thruster to put the customer into any reasonable orbit.

The other option is for SpaceX to sell Starlink busses and offer to launch anything in that bus for a proportional share of the flight costs. It wouldn't cost SX much to integrate if they just slot it in like all the rest of the satellites.

I think there's room for several. Rocket Lab is in, maybe Launcherone if they can get the cost down more, Definitely China will prop up one or 2 of their private companies. I think it's a race between Firefly and Relativity.

If Starship genuinely nails 100% reuse with zero refurbishment between flights, SpaceX will be able to send anything up under 100 tons for the cost of fuel and license. Unless another small sat launcher can do full reuse without refurbishment, and therefore need less fuel than SpaceX for a small payload, they won't be able to compete.

The first time a Falcon 9 launched the second time, everyone else should've thrown every penny they had at reusability and scrapped every single other non-reusable rocket that was under development. But they didn't, because they couldn't accept the writing that was on the wall:

SpaceX could stop building rockets entirely after they finish Mk1, Mk2, and a pair of Super Heavy boosters, then sit back and print money for the next decade while putting everyone else out of business. But they won't. They're going to keep leapfrogging themselves, and it's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that unless Blue Origin or China pull rabbits out of their respective hats, SpaceX will own all intra-solar transport and logistics for the next century.

I fully support your argument, but I have in fact flown that cheap on Ryanair within Europe several times before. They have a small contingent of very cheap seats and the last few get really expensive.

It is definitely possible that different prices will be available, the more flexible the customers.

Yep. Ryanair used to do 1p flights (inc taxes etc) as loss leaders. I once had the option of flying from the UK to Pisa with entire family return for 8p, but hotels, transfers and parking all made it the 'usual expense'.
Edit. My wife flew Birmigham/Dublin return with 4 people for £79.92 a couple of years ago, so such 'silly prices' do really exist.

Are you being intentionally obtuse here? It doesn't take thousands of employees to launch a rocket.

Go back and re-read the comment thread. SpaceX can absolutely undercut everyone else and still turn a profit because of full reusability. Between Starship and Starlink, they'll have all the profit they need for starting Mars colonization.

Maybe if Elon Musk hadn't already said that they were aiming for internal costs that low them maybe people would stop. The reality is that SpaceX wants their per launch cost to be range fees, fuel, minimal refurbishment, and amortized dev costs of each individual ship plus enough profit to pay their employees. Anything extra will go towards R&D.

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that the total cost of a launch can be boiled down to the actual cost to put it in the air. Of course they have overhead, and R&D, and building a base on Mars (I am not even sure how to class that), and staff costs, and all the rest of it. And all of those things will have to play a part in how much they charge. Not to mention a substantial profit margin to build cash reserves for the next goofy thing they try, like paying Tesla to put Starlink antennas in every car. But those costs are not the cost to fly, they are the cost of operations.

Will a Starship launch ever cost less than the cost of RocketLab, no probably not (at least for the full stack). But how much does that really matter when you can toss out hundreds of small sats at $1m a pop, and offer no mass restrictions inside a form factor. Even if you really need a specific orbit, how much bigger of a fuel tank can you afford for $5.5m?

That explains why the Falcon 9 costs $174 million per launch, since it takes 7000 people working for an entire year to launch each one.

Oh, wait, no, that's not how it works at all.

You and all the others who don't understand basic accounting need to recognize the difference between fixed costs and the costs that can be spread over dozens of launches. At no point has anyone in this comment chain claimed that launch will be priced at fuel and license. Stop inventing claims to argue with.

The point, for the last bloody time, is that the minimum fixed cost of launching 100 tons of cargo to LEO on a fully reusable Starship is less than the cost of launching any amount of cargo on a much, much smaller non-reusable rocket. Therefore, SpaceX can undercut everyone else and still make money on the launch.

He didn't say they would just charge fuel costs, he said they could charge much less than the competition and still make money. I think airplanes have a much better profit margin including all the overhead than they would if we threw the plane away each flight.

Of course not. There are huge infrastructure costs although they can be amortized over very long time spans. Those costs could also be viewed as a sunk cost since they need them for their overall business, not just small sat launches. And then there are staff costs which will be required even with a fully reusable launch vehicle requiring little or no refurbishment. The point is, by not requiring a new vehicle for every launch, by far and away the largest recurring cost, which is what we are talking about, they will be able to charge much less and make a profit. Other companies will require all of the recurring costs AND a new booster.

They are their own primary customer with the Starlink cash cow, and future Mars missions anyone else they only need to charge less than the competition, more money in the bank. At that point only govt backed launchers can compete. The Mars cargo missions will probably be older retiring Starships that have flown to LEO and the Moon many times and long since paid for themselves.

Most of the cost isn’t fuel and license, it’s amortization and operating expense. Launch sites are expensive and it takes a lot to make a launch happen still. Maintenance, depreciation, insurance, and operations are the biggest costs for airlines.

Erm.. Starship Super Heavy should use under $1 million in fuel depending on exactly how much SpaceX is paying. I see no path for Electron to launch for that price, even with a zero-cost, zero-refurb first stage recovery. Obviously SpaceX is unlikely to price Starship launches at cost, but when you factor in ride sharing and bi-weekly (or weekly) flights, there's just not going to be much room for third party launchers outside of government-backed "redundancy" providers. Even if you have to wait a few weeks or a couple months to get on a ride-share to the right orbit, that's trivial compared to what the industry is used to.

Starship/superheavy will definitely cost more than $1million in propellant. Starship alone should be in the ballpark of $500k. Vehicle amortization and operational expenses that are required every time you fly will make up the majority of the cost. The absolute minimum cost per launch of $7million, as referenced by Musk in 2018, is unlikely to be met with this vehicle, especially initially.

Starship will likely be very cost effective, but it’s almost certainly going to cost over $10 million per launch, optimistically. The price to the customer will be higher of course.

Honestly, I would be very surprised if they charge less than $35 million per dedicated launch within the first 5 years of operation.

Around the same price as F9/FH initially with higher payload capability until confidence builds then phase out F9/FH as long as there are contracted launches on the older system, makes some sense. So $90/130 million for <20t/60t+ initially.

Assuming full reuse the cost to launch Starship is around $500,000 (fuel plus amortization of the ship). Or $500/ton. That is roughly $4/pound to orbit.

At that price there is nothing on the drawing board that is competitive. It would literally be cheaper to fly a cubesat up on a private Starship launch than get it there by any other option right now.

Of course SX won’t charge that little, but if their goal is to make space accessible then seeing prices plummet really is realistic. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a 100kg payload cost $50,000. Which would still leave SX a huge margin.

Your numbers are way off. SpaceX itself has stated no lower than about $7 million per launch for starship/superheavy. You people don’t seem to understand that propellant isn’t the most expensive item per flight.

Even for commercial airliners, operations, maintenance and depreciation are large parts of the cost per flight. Assuming starship could even approach that kind of cost distribution, it would still be a good deal more expensive than just the marginal propellant utilization.

Starship should prove to be a wonderful advance in spaceflight, but it’s not as simple as many would at first think.

And by the way, the propellant for just starship itself will be on the order of $500,000. The propellant cost for both stages (which are required for any reasonable payload and the ability to land) is well into the millions.

We weren’t talking about their cost of operations and design, just the marginal cost per launch. Obviously you people need to learn to read a financial statement and learn what the terms mean.

As for the price of fuel. You have yours, I am going by what Elon said it cost to fuel the thing. Which was around $200,000. I have never seen a purchase order for methalox with a bulk discount attached so I don’t know have better numbers than that.

Marginal cost per launch includes all operations and maintenance required per flight, but not development cost.

Edit: added more
Again, propellant is not the majority of the marginal cost in any currently existing vehicle even excluding the cost of expendable stages for Falcon. It will be very hard for starship to break past the point where propellant is the most expensive thing. Airlines barely can even do that.

Marginal cost includes ALL recurring expenses required to operate. Dev costs add to that, but with a high flight rate*, they’re not too bad.

I work for a space company that uses a lot of liquid natural gas... it’s cheap, but it’s not as cheap as LOx, and by taking the target liftoff weight of starship and the probable propellant mass fraction and O/F ratio, you can get a pretty good rough cost estimate.

I thought range cost were significant. Somewhere near one order of magnitude higher than propellants cost. That''s a very significant marginal cost. Even at Boca Chica, you have to get licenses and NOTAMs and heavily beefed up insurances.

NOTAM’s aren’t terribly hard to do. Launch licenses are kind of expensive, though those are done in batches increasingly. Range costs are fairly high still, especially for return to launch site, though an order of magnitude more might be a stretch in Starship/superheavy’s case since it has such a high cost of propellant in the first place. I guess we’ll see if they charge more for bigger rockets, but I doubt it would be very different.

Sea recovery is quite expensive because of the extended rentals for ships and the cost of paying the crews. It’s still worthwhile to do reusability, but it’s hard to keep the costs under control.

Also, to clarify my inclusion of amortization of the vehicle in marginal cost, for a launch vehicle, you generally rate for a given number of restarts per engine (landing engines have to be replaced first or rotated to a new position occasionally like car tires) and a given number of flight cycles per airframe. Lots of other components will have individual life cycles as well.

Even with 100 flights per vehicle, the amortization makes up a large part of the cost, though as you get into this range the operations expenses start to take precedent. Any cost comparisons with reusable rockets should take into account the amortization.

Development costs are harder to factor for, because you have to have a good idea of how long the vehicle will be in service and how much extra development will occur while it’s in service.

I used a higher price for methane and a slightly higher LOx price. It got me into the low millions. With the chill-in, storage loss, and other factors, I think it’s reasonable to assume 1-2 million per flight in propellant at least (likely closer to 1 million, though it seems that the propellant load may have increased between 2018 and now). I was under the impression they’re using refined methane, not just LNG.

Operational expenses and vehicle depreciation will certainly be higher, which was really the point I was trying to make.

Just some back of the envelope math... a F9 launch costs $60m, and they can stack 60 Starlinks (250kg each). So on any starlink launch you could probably buy a slot for your Starlink bus smallsat for around $1m.

Rocket Lab charges $6.5m a launch.

If anything accessible from a starlink orbit will work for your mission it would be very difficult to justify spending 6 times more.

Rocket Lab also have their Curie engine for their Photon satellite bus and kick stage as well as launch flexibility and they are going to attempt vehicle recovery with parachutes. So they aren't standing still either. Clearly rideshares are always going to be the cheapest but they may not suit everyone.

I think they've managed to increase the number to 66 Starlinks per Falcon now. Since each orbital plane will have 22 it only makes sense. There was some unused space in the top of the fairing in the last launch.

I doubt they'd be able to fit the same amount of small sats as starlink due to the individual needs of the sats as well as the unusual method used in deploying starling which I doubt would work for small sats

u/Dearmoon2023: She was misquoted, and she was right. There will be less than 10 companies, and that answer encompasses all options below 10 (including zero). [permalink]

very witty, probably true, but maybe not the best thing to say.

I never thought any smallsat launchers would survive either and that includes all the options being developed by startups around the world. But there comes a point when SpaceX starts to look like the future Microsoft of LSP's, not the best PR and it cultivates suspicion of monopolistic intentions.

Yep. That sort of sweeping statement is more typical of Elon and less typical of Gwynne. Surprised she said it.

Could they do it? End each of their non-governmental small-sat competitors?

Yes. It seems quite likely that SpaceX has the necessary tools and acumen to under price all non-government (Chinese) smallsat competitors. This either through offering smallsat customers an extremely inexpensive bus with propulsion, or by directly subsidizing smallsat until the competition goes away.

Should they do it?

A natural monopoly like the one SpaceX enjoys is not typically viewed as a violation. But it is a classic violation to use one's natural monopoly to build market dominance in other areas of business. An extremely inexpensive standardized propulsion bus/module could certainly be viewed a subsidy if targeted at a separate market.

Small-sat is commonly viewed as as separate market, though SpaceX would undoubtedly challenge that assumption. They would likely argue that launch services are launch services, full stop.

Would SpaceX be penalized for destroying the smallsat market.

Not under the current US administration, nor under any likely Democratic administration.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have each been using their dominant market positions to build dominance in entirely different markets, some more than others. None but Microsoft have ever faced anti-trust action, and that was 20 years ago. The anti-trust violations by those firms have immensely greater monetary and societal impact than the rocket business.

Like the firms above, SpaceX has emerged as a shining example of US preeminence. So long as SpaceX does not blatantly offer their services below any reasonable cost, they should face few US legal issues. Europe? Potentially.

Would SpaceX's intentional destruction of the small-sat competition be good for the space business and space exploration?

On the face of it, it doesn't make much sense. The revenue potential seems low to middling, though would love to see the projections. It feels as though they're working to nip spry competitors in the bud.

On your last point, I initially agree that SpaceX had very little need to get into the smallsat market, given the large size of the F9/SS and the headaches of coordinating huge rideshares. That logic would say they are just trying to squash launch competitors.

But reflecting on the recent announcements of their expected launches, the total number of launches for 2019 is low, and that includes the 3-4 Starlink launches where nobody is paying SpaceX for that particular launch. (I'm excluding the "hoped for" potential future revenue from Starlink itself, because that amount is very unknown and doesn't help the current income/finances like a paying launch customer would).

So to me it seems the smart financial experts at SpaceX may have seen this reduction in launch orders and concluded that they needed to get more directly into the smallsat market in order to keep revenue where it needs to be.

I am sure they do but at least some of the launches will be to SSO so will use Vandenberg.

Absolutely. And that would fully explain a limited SpaceX entry into the small-sat market.

But it doesn't explain Shotwell's suggestion that SpaceX is setting out to kill all small-sat competition.

Now perhaps Shotwell wasn't saying that. Perhaps she subscribes to a belief that there is no business case for small-sat in isolation. Or perhaps she believes that none of the current small-set firms are either technically able or financially viable. But these latter possibilities seem unlikely, especially given Rocket Lab's successes and ambitious plans.

The most likely read on Shotwell's statement is that SpaceX plans to make offerings which will so under-price their small-sat rivals, those other provider's services will be made financially nonviable.

The question is: Why does SpaceX feel the need to confront these trivial upstarts so mercilessly?

You are kind of assuming that these hypothetically low SpaceX prices will be artificial and set that low for the express purpose of pushing out competitors. The other possibility is that the pricepoint will be that low because they can still be profitable there and that's just what makes business sense for SpaceX to encourage elasticity in the market for their own purposes. Killing smallsat competitors might be purely incidental.

Remember that at IAC 2017, Elon claimed that a fully reusable Starship launch system will be cheaper to operate than a Falcon 1. Part of that depends on multiple flights though.

You are kind of assuming that these hypothetically low SpaceX prices will be artificial and set that low for the express purpose of pushing out competitors

Killing smallsat competitors might be purely incidental.

It's not just me who believes this. Anthony Colangelo in the newly released MECO podcast arrives at the same conclusion.

He, like me, questions the economic viability of SpaceX's small-set venture. He also believe that SpaceX is being "predatory". His politic way of saying that SpaceX is actively working to kill their small-sat competition.

Though he does believe that SpaceX received more interest in their small-sat product than anticipated. He points out that the product now being offered by SpaceX is worlds different from the initial Vandenberg offering.

We're getting this second and third-hand, but it seems like the title is capturing the essence of the tweet. What other interpretation is there? Why would Shotwell care whether one of the options included zero unless she felt like that option was the one she wanted to answer with?

No, no small launchers will survive because you can achieve more orbits with a larger launch volume and tech that allows you to reach more orbits while ridesharing. Like, launch a smallsat AND a small rocket for a fraction of the price and hit the orbit you need.

There is another way to interpret this. If Shotwell believes that reusability makes more sense than discarding rockets, even if the rockets are small, then she may be thinking that smallsat launchers will inevitably scale up their platforms as they develop reusability technology. If that were to happen, it would make sense for them to scale up enough that they are no longer necessarily considered "smallsat".

This helps attribute the author and convey the content of the tweet clearly. If you feel the need to include extra information, such as the author's proper name (where it differs from their Twitter handle) this should be done using the square brackets. Thanks!

I agree, but also because twitter is not an open platform - you need an ID. If you dont use an ID/login you quickly get "we are sorry, login to enjoy orntry refreshing" more often than not when you visit more tha once a month... so often with tweets im waiting for someone to rehost as imgur, etc

When an electron class small sat launcher is $50,000 or less then maybe it will be competitive, but Starship will be sending them up in such huge quantities and on ride-shares that a smallsat launcher will seem a joke. Her answer is great😂